Einstein G O, Smith R E, McDaniel M A, Shaw P
Department of Psychology, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina 29613, USA.
Psychol Aging. 1997 Sep;12(3):479-88. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.12.3.479.
A feature of prospective memory tasks is that they tend to be embedded into other background activities. Two experiments examined how the demands of these background activities affect age differences in prospective memory. The first experiment showed that increasing the demands of the background activities (by adding a digit-monitoring task) significantly reduced prospective memory performance. Planned comparisons revealed that age differences in prospective memory were reliable only in the more demanding background condition. The second experiment revealed significant prospective memory declines when the demands were selectively increased at encoding for both younger and older adults. When the demands were selectively increased at retrieval, older adults were particularly affected. The authors propose a model that relies on both automatic retrieval processes and working memory resources to explain prospective memory remembering.
前瞻性记忆任务的一个特点是它们往往嵌入到其他背景活动中。两项实验研究了这些背景活动的要求如何影响前瞻性记忆中的年龄差异。第一个实验表明，增加背景活动的要求（通过添加一个数字监测任务）会显著降低前瞻性记忆表现。计划比较显示，前瞻性记忆中的年龄差异仅在要求更高的背景条件下才可靠。第二个实验表明，当在编码时选择性地增加要求时，年轻人和老年人的前瞻性记忆都会显著下降。当在检索时选择性地增加要求时，老年人受到的影响尤其大。作者提出了一个模型，该模型依赖于自动检索过程和工作记忆资源来解释前瞻性记忆。
